Kinship and local community in Akwapem

Domestic rights & duties in Southern Ghan

Power, Law and Blood: Sources of Patriarchy in the Middle East

This unpublished article was kindly provided to BU's institutional repository for deposit by the author

The Decline of Marriage in Namibia

In Southern Africa, marriage used to be widespread and common. However, over the past decades marriage rates have declined significantly. Julia Pauli explores the meaning of marriage when only few marry. Although marriage rates have dropped sharply, the value of weddings and marriages has not. To marry has become an indicator of upper-class status that less affluent people aspire to. Using the appropriation of marriage by a rural Namibian elite as a case study, the book tells the entwined stories of class formation and marriage decline in post-apartheid Namibia

Romano-British people and the language of sociology

YesDespite the vast amount of work and the huge database for Roman Britain, the people of the province remain very difficult to discern. There are many reasons for this, but one is that we have not yet learned to look behind the disjecta membra of archaeology in order to understand the structure and nature of society, and how the Roman Conquest may have impacted upon it. The language of sociology offers scope for thought, especially when combined with examples drawn from historically documented societies in later periods. Whilst models drawn from the classical world are important, attention also needs to be focused on the local, and on the factors that determined the shape of people¿s lives and influenced their daily activities. Not all these are archaeologically detectable, nevertheless an appreciation of their existence is an important pre-requisite in attempting explanations of patterns in the data. `The self image of some historians makes it appear as if they are concerned in their work exclusively with individuals without figurations, with people wholly independent of others. The self image of many sociologists makes it appear as if they are concerned exclusively with figurations without individuals, societies or `systems¿ wholly independent of individual people. ¿ both approaches, and the self images underlying them, lead their practitioners astray. On closer examination we find that both disciplines are merely directing their attention to different strata or levels of one and the same historical process¿. (Elias, The Court Society, Oxford 1983

The prologue: family studies in Ghana 1920-1970

Domestic rights & duties in Southern Ghan

Generational Inversions: \u27Working\u27 for Social Reproduction amid HIV in Swaziland

How do people envision social reproduction when regular modes of generational succession and continuity are disrupted in the context of HIV/AIDS? How and where can scholars identify local ideas for restoring intergenerational practices of obligation and dependency that produce mutuality rather than conflict across age groups? Expanding from studies of HIV/AIDS and religion in Africa, this article pushes for an analytic engagement with ritual as a space and mode of action to both situate local concerns about and practices for restoring dynamics of social reproduction. It describes how the enduring HIV/AIDS epidemic in Swaziland contoured age patterns of mortality where persons identified socially and chronologically as youth have predeceased their elders. Based on discourse analyses of ethnography at church worship services and life cycle rites between 2008 and 2011, the findings show how both elders and youth understood this crisis of ‘generational inversions’ as a non-alignment of age groups and articulated projects to restore succession and continuity in vernacular idioms of ‘work’ as moralised social and ritual action

The Luo Care for Widows (Lako) and Contemporary Challenges

This paper examines the Luo custom of caring for a ‘widow’ and for the home of a deceased husband, its rationale and some of its contemporary challenges. The paper maintains that this custom is still the best alternative available to the Luo widow and for the care of the home of one’s deceased brother, especially in the context of Luo culture. However, it recommends a number of adjustments to the practice to discourage some of the abuses that are becoming prevalent in it, with a view to making it more amenable to some of the challenges of our time.   Key Words Levirate, Wife Inheritance, Luo, Lwo, Kenya&#160

Outliving Love: Marital Estrangement in an African Insurance Market

Marital estrangement and formal divorce are vital conjunctures for married women’s kinship relations and life course, where a horizon of future possibilities are revalued and negotiated at the interstices of custom, law, and social and ritual obligations. In this article, after delineating the forms of customary and civil marriage and the possibilities for divorce or estrangement from each, I describe how some married women in Swaziland and South Africa mediate this complex social field for their children and families through pensions and continuing to pay for their partners’ insurance coverage. This was not solely out of avarice to reap future benefits as spouses. Rather, in a context of patriarchal relations, gender-based violence and economic dispossession, women seek to maintain potential financial grounds through insurance resources, acknowledge their children’s paternity, and fulfil enduring obligations to in-laws by partially contributing to the eventual funerals of their spouses and kin